


Vital Signs

by appelwagon



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: JK it gets resolved, M/M, Pining, Post-Whispers Under Ground, Unresolved Sexual Tension, very loose interpretations of how magic works in this universe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-14
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-03-31 04:30:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13967373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/appelwagon/pseuds/appelwagon
Summary: Set immediately Post-Whispers Under Ground.  Peter finally learns how to differentiate one practitioner's signare from another's.  Complications ensue.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Full disclosure: I started writing this immediately after reading Whispers Under Ground with 0 knowledge of what would happen in books 4-6, so there are probably more than a few areas where I wander away from canon.

It's hard to explain what a particular wizard’s _signare_ feels like to someone who's never dabbled in magic. If you’d asked me to describe it in the early days of my magical training, the best I’d probably manage would be something along the lines of ‘I dunno, it feels like shapes and stuff.’ Ever the poet, me.

It wasn't til Lesley moved into the Folly that I could even begin to sense the slightest difference between one practitioner and another, and even then it felt so faint I couldn't be sure I wasn't making it all up. And - brace yourself for a shock, but neither Lesley nor Nightingale were much of a help on that front. The one time I managed to irritate a more elaborate response out of Nightingale, he hadn’t given me much to work with.

“I know this is a terribly trying concept for your scientific mind, but some things just can’t be quantified, Peter,” he’d said, frowning down at the newspaper in his lap. “You read _signare_ the way a _sommelier_ identifies wine - it takes a great deal of study and practice.”

He’d deigned to flick his grey eyes up at me where I stood like an oversized orphan Oliver holding out the metaphorical porridge bowl, and gave me a faintly amused look. “Perhaps if you apply yourself to actually learning spells instead of picking them apart like a loose hem, you’ll develop the skill one day.”

And so, chucking that particular jewel of wisdom at me, ended his largesse.

Thanks to that distinctly unhelpful conversation, I spent a good month or two chasing down the wrong lead. Lesley grudgingly agreed to help me with my experiments, so long as I agreed to be the target in her live target practice - thus killing two birds with one stone. Never let it be said that the Met doesn’t believe in streamlining its work processes and boosting the efficiency of its boys and girls in blue - in this case, by allowing one copper to telepathically chuck apples at another copper, whilst the latter tried to sniff out her brain waves.

“Kind of… golden, maybe?” I shouted, narrowly jerking my head back as an apple whistled past. Lesley’s _impello_ was… forceful.

I could hear the frown in her voice when she said, “Golden? What sort of a smell is ‘golden?’” An apple nailed me square in the kidney.

“I don’t know,” I wheezed. “Sunshiney?” 

“Still not a smell.” I got appled in the shoulder.

“Oi!” I yelped. “Honestly, I mainly smell smashed apple.”

Another fruit to the knee. “Constant vigilance!” Lesley crowed, and it sort of went pear-shaped from there. Pun intended. Most of our practice sessions fell apart that way, leaving me exactly as _signare_ -blind as I had been before.

The thing is, I _did_ get faint smells and impressions from spells, the way a wine-taster could swish around a mouthful of red and pick out hints of this or that. But those sense impressions never felt strong enough that I could distinguish one from the other. It was frustrating, but I assumed - as Nightingale had said - that my senses would suddenly snap into focus after a while, if I kept trying.

I said as much to Postmartin, about two months into what was less trial and more error. He’d come to London for an archivists’ conference, and Nightingale had offered to put him up in the Folly. After settling in, Postmartin made a disapproving lap around the mundane library, muttering to himself as he picked through the card index. “The state of your records is absolutely appalling, Thomas,” he said, while I gloated silently behind his shoulder. Nightingale shot me a flat look, and I shrugged, pointing at Postmartin’s back and pulling a ‘what can you do?’ face.

“You must allow me organize your collection. Perhaps next Trinity Term, I can take a leave of absence and get these in order.” He said that last bit nearly to himself, with the gleam in his eye of a man facing a dazzling horizon.

“Right, well,” Nightingale coughed. “Perhaps - ah, here’s Molly with the tea.”

I pulled another face at him as he hastily escorted Postmartin to the armchairs by the window. He gave me a look that told me he would roll his eyes if only it weren’t so beneath him.

Nightingale, Lesley and me usually didn’t go in for a formal tea, as the grinding gears of the law generally cranked on through tea time. I wasn’t exactly sure what I expected to appear on Molly’s tray when she sat it on the polished wood table, but she played it relatively subdued that day with bacon sarnies, neat slices of lardy cake, and a pot of Ceylon.

“So,” Postmartin smiled at me as he manhandled a sandwich, “Thomas tells me you’ve been working on a number of experiments. I do appreciate an inquisitive young mind.”

“I try, sir,” I said piously, “to do my bit to further the field of magical inquiry.” I saw Nightingale quickly raise his teacup to hide a smile, and felt a victorious little twinge of accomplishment.

“And what exactly have you been studying, young man?” I glanced at Nightingale again, but he just raised his eyebrows and crossed his long legs at the knee, so I took that as permission to ramble on a bit. “Well,” I said, leaning forward, “I had a thought that _aer congolare_ could be altered for different applications. If you can use it as a shield, why not as a -” I paused, groping for the word - “maybe, a stepping stone? An invisible stairway. If it can deflect, it’s possible it could be altered to support weight.”

“Interesting,” Postmartin nodded, watching me with keen eyes. “Have you had any success?”

“Not really. It’s a bit slippery, like walking on an oil slick.”

“As some of your bruises can attest,” Nightingale muttered into his cup.

“Also -” I continued loudly, charging on with this rare opportunity at an attentive audience, “I’m trying to distinguish one practitioner’s _signare_ from another, but I’m not having much luck on that front.”

“Not surprising,” Postmartin said. “Now _that’s_ a tricky skill to teach.”

“So I hear,” I said through a mouthful of bacon. “Matter of time, practice, etcetera.”

“Not only that, but the variations in sensory impressions from practitioner to practitioner make the _signare_ nearly impossible to translate.”

I frowned. “Sorry, the variations in the what?”

Postmartin blinked. “Well,” he said slowly, “the way that Thomas’ _signare_ feels to me might feel entirely different to you.”

Stop the presses. This was new. “So it’s not like a fingerprint, then? Where anyone can spot the same _signare_ out of a lineup?”

“Not at all,” Postmartin shook his head. “The way a practitioner experiences _signare_ is as unique as the individual _signum_ itself.”

Sometimes, I forgot that my boss had spent the last decade or six as a hermit who mainly kept the company of a silent woman of mystery, and never left the house except for the occasional murder or an exorcism or two. Even in the Folly’s heyday, before the war, I had the impression that he didn’t bump shoulders with other practitioners much, preferring to hike around the colonies challenging tigers to duels, or whatever it was Her Majesty’s emissaries got up to back in the day. Not one for the community of scholarship, Nightingale mainly taught me what he learned from raw experience or from the Folly’s libraries - and apparently, he had missed this bit.

“When you say unique?” I asked, setting my cup aside.

“Well,” Postmartin said thoughtfully, tucking his chin into his collar. “How do I explain this. Thomas’ _signare_ , to me, looks like an intricate knot. No matter the _forma_ , I can see the pattern and tracery of that knot woven into the spell. Whereas you may see a coloured ray of light, or experience the _signare_ as a musical tone.”

I looked over at Nightingale to see how he was taking this. He looked interested, his arms crossed and his thumb resting on his lip. “I suppose I always assumed the sensory impression I felt from one practitioner’s _signare_ was felt by all. It never occurred to me to ask.”

“To be fair, there isn’t much scholarship in the area.” Postmartin said. “How do you apply a systematic approach to studying a purely subjective phenomenon?”

A sudden thought occurred to me. “Is it the same with _vestigia_?” I asked. “Different for everybody?”

Postmartin shook his head. “There seems to be a degree of consistency in reported reactions to _vestigia_ ,” he said. “Only a wizard’s _signare_ appears to be more… synaesthetic.”

“So how would you suggest I go about feeling it out?” I asked. “This whole time I’ve been sniffing around, like I could smell it out like Toby the Dog.”

“Don’t think about it too hard,” Postmartin said kindly. “It’ll come to you. When it does, you won’t be able to switch it off.”

Turns out, he was right. Terribly, horribly right.

\-----------

If you had asked me at the beginning of my ghost hunting career to reel off my list of top ten potential haunted hot spots in London, like a Time Out editor for the hip ghost about town, I doubt the Wellcome Collection would have even pinged my top fifty. As bland an example of neoclassical staidness as its architects could crank out, its 1930s facade covered an interior that had been hollowed out in 2007 and replaced with sterile white tile, blonde maple laminate, glass panes and steel fixtures. Any _vestigia_ that might have been kicking around previous to the renovation wouldn’t find much to sink its claws into. I figured it’d be a clean slate, wiped free of ghost residue and any accompanying weirdness that would require us getting involved.

So when Nightingale popped his head into the reading room one sunny Monday morning and told me to gear up for the 10 minute walk to Euston Rd., I thought he’d just taken a fancy to seeing some pickled organs in jars and wanted company for his museum outing. Since I already saw more than my fair share of severed body parts on the job, thanks to Dr. Walid and his ever-expanding cauliflower brain collection, I wasn’t too keen on the prospect - but it was at least a step up from the poetic stylings of one Gaius Lucilius.

Not to mention it’d be nice to have a break. I’d gotten sidetracked from my _signare_ studies by some small bumps in the road in the past weeks, such as getting swallowed by the earth beneath Oxford station and discovering a underground civilization of whispering mole people. But now that things had settled down again - relatively speaking - Nightingale had it in his mind that Lesley and I needed to ramp up our magical education to ludicrous speed. Lesley blamed me for this, chalking it all up to my encounter with Stephen the earthbender. “If you hadn’t almost died, he wouldn’t be nearly so bent out of shape about our progress,” she’d groused after a particularly grueling session at the target range.

She was probably right. The moral of the story being, don’t get yourself into too many life-or-death scenarios if you don’t want your guv piling on the homework. Our schedules didn’t leave much time for dabbling. Or even eating or sleeping. So I didn’t overly mind the prospect of a field trip with the boss.

I met him at the steps of the Folly, hopping awkwardly on one foot to squeeze into my trainers. He gave me an amused look and steadied me with a surprisingly firm grip at my elbow as I finished jamming my foot in. I always forgot how much strength he kept hidden beneath his impeccably tailored suits. Today, he wore his dark woolen winter overcoat, which opened to the smooth hollow of his throat. I looked away quickly when I noticed, feeling weirdly caught out.

“No,” he said when I asked him about the trip, “not a casual outing. We’ve been called in to consult.”

“By who?”

“Whom,” Nightingale corrected automatically. I don’t think he even noticed when he did it anymore. “There’s been an unusual rash of illness among staff working in a certain exhibition area.”

“Sounds more like a problem for the PHE,” I said. “But I’m guessing you’re about to tell me the staff is sprouting tails or turning into a race of giant bat people or something.”

“Not quite,” said Nightingale. “Where do you _get_ these ideas?”

“The corrupting influence of Auntie Beeb,” I said, and caught another stifled smile from Nightingale in the creased corners around his eyes.

“This particular case,” he said, “fell into our laps because the symptoms seem to wear off by the time the afflicted arrive at a doctor’s office, but reappear upon re-entry of the museum.”

“Sounds like a creative use of sick leave to me. Not a bad scheme.”

“Be that as it may,” Nightingale said, “I think it’s worth investigating. If it is a phantom plague, it’ll take some tricky spellwork to sort out. I’d like for you to see some of these higher-order spells in action.”

I couldn’t argue with that. Plus, this would give me plenty of data to work with on the _signare_ front. Lesley was going to be well pissed she’d missed this for a hospital consult.

I had some second thoughts, though, when a security guard in full hazmat regalia met us at the door to let us in.

“You sure about this, sir?” I asked when Nightingale waved away the two suits proffered us, and marched on through the spartan lobby with the confidence of a man who was _not_ walking into a potential ghost-germ bacchanalia.

“I’m fairly certain I know what we’re dealing with,” he said, looking alert as he peered through the doorways and halls that we passed. “Can you feel that?”

I could barely make out the _vestigia_ at first, but it grew stronger as we followed its trail. Wet, rotting wood, sweat, vomit. Your garden variety of bodily fluids. And behind it all, a hint of a salty sea wind and flapping canvas.

“Are we consorting with a ghost pirate?” I asked, just as we turned through one last doorway and straight into _vestigia_ central. And, yep, pirate it was.

The room was painted a dark maroonish-red that made it feel airless and tight. Acrylic exhibit cases stood at odd angles about the room, forming a cramped walking path through the beached detritus of naval medical history. The curator apparently hadn’t trusted the unwashed hordes of the British public to catch on to the general nautical theme, and posted a snarling pirate mannequin at the door. He watched us with a beady glass eye that made me reach out and tap him to make sure he wasn’t some kind of stealth mannequin demon.

“Are demon mannequins a thing?” I stage whispered to Nightingale.

He turned and frowned at me. “Why are you whispering, Peter?”

“Because if I were to find myself surrounded by an army of plastic people, I wouldn’t want to agitate them.” I probably needed to cut back on the _Doctor Who_. Judging by the look Nightingale gave me, he agreed.

“Back to the matter at hand,” he said dryly. But before he could finish that thought, we were interrupted by the tread of a well-shod business professional trying to run in high heels without falling arse over tit.

The museum’s director rounded the corner like a frazzled comet. I could tell she was the director because of my keen policing eye and deductive reasoning skills. Also, she wore an ID badge. Her hair was red, her blouse was red, her skirt was red, and her heels were - you guessed it - also red. I’d assume that her lips were the same shade, but it was hard to tell behind the dental mask that covered a good three-quarters of her face. Her brown eyes looked a bit frantic, and she exclaimed a muffled “Ohthankgod” when she saw us.

“Dr. Bartlett, I presume,” Nightingale said, extending a hand. She looked at it, but didn’t take it, instead wringing her own blue rubber gloved hands together. I don’t think I’d ever seen somebody actually wring their hands before. I thought it was something that people only did in Bronte novels before having a quick swoon.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a high, nervous voice. “I just - I can’t - I don’t want to expose you if there’s a danger.”

“I don’t believe you’ll need to worry about that much longer,” Nightingale said. “Everything I’ve seen so far points to a simple resolution.”

“So it _is_ the air ducts?” Bartlett breathed. “An allergen, or - ?”

“Something like that,” Nightingale said. “If you wouldn’t mind, Dr. Bartlett, I’d like a full inventory of the artefacts currently on display in this room, particularly any records you may have on their provenance. We’d be most grateful for the information.”

I had an idea that Nightingale had already pinpointed the item at the center of the weirdness, and only really needed the documentation for that one artefact. But judging by the relief on Bartlett’s face, I guessed Nightingale was trying to be kind by giving her a solid reason to stay far away from the exhibit room. Or he was getting her out of our hair while we magicked away whatever ghost plague had settled in her museum. Whatever the reason, she legged it out of there as fast as she could.

Nightingale nodded his head toward the center of the room, giving me a significant look. I followed his lead to a display case where the _vestigia_ thickened into a truly rancid cloud. The smell of vomit was so strong I thought I might be sick myself.

I gagged. “That’s a decent amount of _vestigia_ to be left clinging to wood and metal.”

“Yes, well, its owner did not go gentle into that good night,” Nightingale murmured. His quick eyes scanned the placard at the base of the mounted prosthetic arm.

“What did him in?” I asked, covering my nose and leaning over his shoulder to read along. “Overindulged in a bit of rum, sodomy and the lash?”

I realized what I’d said, who I’d said it to, and how I was positioned in proximity to said person only after the words had left my mouth. We both stiffened almost imperceptibly, and in the ritual dance known to masculine men the world over, shuffled apart as if we hadn’t noticed we’d been leaning into each other in the first place. I coughed once, and tried to look casual.

“How he died was unimportant,” Nightingale said quickly. “I mean, yes, it was important, but - it - yes. He died of typhus.”

I frowned. “But how is that connected to his arm?”

Nightingale gave me a sidelong look, then tapped at the placard. “Typhus took the entire crew of this particular brig. Sometimes, when disease is involved, a mass death of this sort will leave an... impression, if you will, on material objects nearby. Stronger than your typical _vestigium_.”

“The phantom plague,” I repeated in a dramatic voice.

“Indeed,” Nightingale said. “The afflicted experience all of the symptoms of the disease, without the actual underlying illness. Highly unpleasant, but usually non-lethal.”

I turned that over in my mind. “So there may be other artefacts from the same ship circulating through the public, giving anyone who comes within a decent radius a dose of phantom typhus?”

Nightingale nodded. “That’s precisely why we’ll need to trace this arm’s provenance. Given your affinity for rooting around that - what is it called - that electronic index of stolen arts and artefacts-”

“LSAD,” I said promptly, never one to let an opportunity to have one over on the boss pass me by.

“Yes, that,” Nightingale said with a vague little wave. “It’s unlikely we’ll find ourselves with a rash of these artefacts on our hands, but it certainly won’t hurt to keep a weather eye on that index of yours for any items salvaged from the same ship.”

While he spoke, Nightingale circled the case, his eyes intent on the arm. He didn’t seem overly bothered by the _vestigia_ , which was not growing any more fragrant, I might add. The stench felt like it was seeping into my hair follicles, and I could sense the stirrings of an absolute whopper of a headache getting ready to enter stage left. The only sign that Nightingale was bothered was a faint crease between his eyebrows.

“All right, Peter,” he said finally. “This will require a sixth-order spell, and I won’t expect you to follow or recognize the _formae_ involved. I would, however, like for you to focus on the grammar of the spell, or the way the _formae_ link together to form a cohesive incantation. Newton’s logic can get a bit murky on this front, so it won’t hurt for you to start familiarizing yourself with the structure of higher order spells now.”

I gave him a nod, and he straightened, placing his long fingers against the glass. I wanted to watch him work - something about the elegant, controlled way Nightingale cast a spell still gave me a sort of quiet thrill, even after a year and change as his apprentice - but I knew I would sense the _formae_ better with my eyes closed and my senses focused. So I loosened my shoulders, trying to relax as much as I could without breathing in too deeply through my nose, and closed my eyes.

And I felt it. His _signare_. I’d say it was the first time, except it was more like the first time I realized that what I’d felt this whole time _was_ his _signare_. Like when you’re at the optician’s, and they switch out the lens you’re looking through, and that letter ‘E’ you’d thought was just a blob is suddenly right in your face.

I sucked in a breath, because when I say I felt it, I literally mean I _felt_ it. The clean, muscular tug of Nightingale’s magic twisted warmly and deliberately through me. It sent a shudder up my spine and put the fine hairs on my arms on end. I felt all six _formae_ in the spell move across me, too, in Nightingale’s precise style, like they’d been traced directly on my veins. Like he had cracked me right open. In that moment I honestly couldn’t fathom how I’d missed his _signare_ this whole time.

I must’ve looked as poleaxed as I felt, because the next thing I registered - beyond getting felt up by Nightingale’s _signare_ , that is - was his concerned voice at my ear.

“Are you all right, Peter?” He touched my arm.

That startled me out of my daze. I may have jerked away from him a bit harder than I meant to. “Fine, fine,” I said in a voice as light and breezy as a Swedish sauna.

“You certainly don’t look fine,” Nightingale said. “I wonder if I might have slipped up with that last _detrahere_.” He gave the wooden arm a troubled look before turning back to me, moving closer and peering into my eyes. I noticed he smelled like bar soap and sandalwood, and a darker undercurrent that was just him. “Do you feel feverish? Nauseous? I fear I may not have expunged the last traces of the imprint entirely -” He reached for my forehead, and it was all just too much.

“Expunged, right, it all feels expunged from here,” I said - too loudly, maybe - and backpedalled with haste.

Now Nightingale looked suspicious, but he just settled on giving me a skeptical look instead of resorting to advanced interrogation tactics. “I’ll be the judge of that,” he said, and turned back to the display case. This time, I had a chance to brace myself before Nightingale cast the spell, which felt like a pared down version of the one he’d cast before.

Part of me had hoped that my reaction to the first spell had just been the result of concentrating too hard on what Nightingale was doing, or something. Turns out, this was not the case. It felt just as intense the second go-round. The same quicksilver pressure travelled through me like a drawn-out shock, and I had to lock my knees just to stay upright.

I did, however, hide it better. This time, when Nightingale turned and gave me a quick once-over, he seemed satisfied. He tucked his hands into his pockets with a pleased smile. “It’s rather nice to have a simple resolution to one of our magical problems for a change,” he said.

 _Right_ , I thought with a frozen smile that was 90% silent screaming. _Simple_.


	2. Chapter 2

I had an easy job of it when I moved into the Folly, mostly because I hadn’t collected much by way of possessions. It’s not like I was living high on the hog at that time, being the lowly probationary officer that I was. But honestly, even now that I’ve padded out my bank account some, I still don’t own much. It’s really a matter of practicality - or as Lesley likes to suggest, sheer laziness. As a person with a pretty laissez-faire attitude towards tidiness, I came to the realization early on that it’s hard to create a mess if you don’t have anything to get messy in the first place. It helps that I’m not particularly sentimental, and don’t mind schlepping a box or three of my belongings down to Oxfam round Christmas every year.

There are some lucky survivors that make it through each annual purge - the most significant being my small but mighty collection of books. I kept them lined up on the heavy Victorian Renaissance Revival writing desk that had come with my room, using two bookends I’d pilfered from the mundane library to keep them upright. I liked the way they looked reflected on the polished mahogany surface, though the beat-up paperbacks looked like they felt a little embarrassed to be there.

I kept my copy of _The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy_ at the front end - and not just because Adams, Douglas floated to the top alphabetically. Sometimes, you just needed the words ‘DON’T PANIC’ to be the first thing you saw when you came into a room.

This was one of those times.

So far, I thought as I paced around the room, I had a sample size of one. Hardly enough to start building assumptions on. It could still be a fluke. Maybe it had been a particularly lusty pirate that’d succumbed to the typhus, and the hot coil of arousal I’d felt was just _vestigia_.

Or maybe I was just doomed to sense _signare_ with my John Thomas for the rest of my life.

Or maybe - and this was the thought that my mind kept veering and sliding around like a car on an ice patch - it was just Nightingale.

I stopped in my tracks and felt heat rise up my chest and above my collar. In the silence, I could faintly hear Nightingale puttering around his room one floor above, the old wooden boards creaking even under his light tread. I had a sudden, vivid image of him barefooted and in his shirtsleeves, cuffs rolled up to his elbows to show pale, lean forearms and elegant wrists. Maybe his hair’d be a bit mussed. And maybe the Victorians were right about their less-is-more attitude towards sex appeal, because that image alone was enough to leave me breathless.

God, I thought in a daze, it was true, wasn’t it. I was hot for my boss. My very old, very male boss. When I’d sworn off magical women that past summer, I had clearly just played a karmic trick on myself, because now I found myself panting for the wrist bones of a very magical man. And now, even his magic was conspiring against me.

I sat heavily on my bed. One thing was clear, I needed to get a grip of myself - and no, not in that way, thanks. I was jumping too quickly to conclusions. Making assumptions. Something I, as a member of her Majesty’s constabulary, had been trained specifically not to do. But the more I tried to sort through my thoughts, the more jumbled they got.

Eventually, I retreated to the tech cave, because I figured if I was going to have a crisis of sexuality, I could at least multitask and get some work done at the same time. Once I was safely ensconced in the coach house, far from the distracting putterings of DCI Thomas Nightingale, I plugged the USB that Dr. Bartlett had given me into my laptop and pulled up the record on the haunted arm, which actually ended up being a pretty interesting distraction. Two of its articulated wooden fingers, I learned, were fitted with metal hooks to help grab onto things, and I wondered how long it would take for seawater and salt air to start eating away at something like that.

I’d started googling the corrosion rates of different metals in salt water when I heard footsteps coming up the spiral steps. I froze, until I realized the steps were coming up at a trot, so it could only be Lesley. Nightingale definitely didn’t trot, and Molly only seemed to operate at a glide.

“All right, Peter?” Lesley said as her blonde head emerged from the stair.

And like an utter knob, I opened my mouth and instead of saying something like ‘hello,’ or ‘I’m fine, thanks, and you,’ what came out was, “Have you ever fancied another woman before?”

That got me a pretty dark look, so of course I had to backtrack and explain where the fuck that had come from, and by the time I had finished jamming my foot in my mouth her blue eyes had turned more - I don’t know, compassionate, maybe? Less deadly, let’s say.

“Oh, Peter,” she sighed as she went for the fridge. “I’m going to need a beer if we’re really going to get into this.” She nabbed a Red Stripe, unclipping her mask with the other hand - she was getting pretty good at that - and made herself comfortable on the couch.

“So which part is it you’re really struggling with?” she asked, taking a careful swig of her beer. “Is it the magic bit, or the Nightingale bit?”

“I’m not sure how much I can really untangle those two things from each other,” I said, “that’s the problem.”

“Well,” she said matter of factly, “let’s give it a try. What do you feel when I do this?” She opened her hand to reveal a perfect globe of water. Showoff.

Dutifully, I closed my eyes and concentrated. Odds were, I thought, this could go one of three ways. First, I wouldn’t feel anything at all because Wellcome had been a fluke. Second, I’d get all hot and bothered again, and would have to resign myself to a life of unfortunate erections every time someone needed a werelight. And behind door three - that way lay inappropriate, non-workplace-friendly reactions to my boss, and only my boss. I wasn’t entirely sure which was the worst case scenario.

Lesley’s magic, it turned out, felt like walking into an unexpected sunbeam on an overcast day - warm, strong, and bright. There was a bit of an edge to it, too, like handling the dull end of a blade but knowing your fingers could slip at any time. More to the point, it _didn’t_ make me feel like a fly trapped in some sort of sexy, magical amber, or cause any disturbances in my nether regions.

Lesley closed her fist again, and her _signare_ faded from the room. She looked at me expectantly over the rim of her bottle.

“Well,” I said, more calmly than I felt, “I’m almost definitely not as straight as I thought I was.”

Lesley snorted at that, but at least had the decency to look semi-repentant when I glared at her. “Sorry,” she said, “It’s just I could’ve told you that.”

I stared at her. “Are you serious?” I said.

“Do me a favor,” Lesley rolled her eyes. “Seriously, Peter, for someone who can’t leave an unanswered question alone once he’s sunk his teeth in, you can be amazingly dense about some things.”

When I continued to stare at her, uncomprehending, she held up her fingers and began ticking them off. “Brent Wood from Hendon. That bartender at The Court, you only wanted to go there on his shift. Oxley -”

“Excuse me?” I said, “What’s this about Oxley?”

“The way you talk about him isn’t exactly neutral,” Lesley said, pointing her beer at me. “I’ve heard you wax poetic over his ‘wiry arms’ one too many times.”

“Point,” I said.

“And plus,” she continued, “You’re really terrible at hiding a crush, Peter. I’m pretty sure you’ve been mad for Nightingale from the start.”

She was right, of course. Lesley was always right. I had an extraordinary ability to build walls around things I didn’t want to think about, and by walls, I meant siege-proof medieval fortresses. Being less than straight would toss a wrench into my already wrench-filled life, and it wasn’t like I had a lack of amazing women around to distract me from the occasional handsome face.

But now that the metaphorical cat was out of the bag, I couldn’t exactly jam the poor bastard back in. Especially if I was going to have to spend countless hours each week with Nightingale in the target range, or in the labs, or on a case -

When I finally looked up, Lesley’s eyes had softened again, like she could hear what I’d been thinking. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Keep doing what I’m doing and hope it gets easier to deal with.”

Lesley paused with her beer half raised. “That’s it?” she said, “stiff upper lip with a side of manful repression?”

“What else can I do?” I said. “He’s 120 years old. He’s my boss. He’s never shown even the smallest flicker of romantic interest in any sort of higher life form. He’s -” I cut myself off before I could well and truly get on a roll, and slumped back in my chair. “Look,” I said, “I can only deal with one crisis at a time. I’ve only just started to consider that I might not be totally straight.”

“That’s all well and good,” Lesley said, “but you can only run so far from this particular problem. What with the -” she made a flourish with her hand, which I took to mean _signare_.

“I can handle it,” I said, a lot more confidently than I felt.

Lesley made sure to hold this over my head, later.

First, though, I had to cope with the newfound knowledge of what exactly it was that Nightingale got up to after dinner. The three of us ate a relatively subdued meal that night under Molly’s watchful eye - a blisteringly hot pie and mash - and talked about nothing in particular. Nightingale asked after the details of Lesley’s upcoming surgery, Lesley asked after the phantom plague, and I fed scraps to Toby the Dog and tried not to pay attention to the warmth of Nightingale’s leg under the table, close to mine. Occasionally his grey eyes would flick over to me as Lesley spoke, because of course he’d noticed I was being quiet. I tried to join in the conversation after that, but curled my legs further under my chair.

I went straight to my room after dinner, because honestly all that personal reflection and self-discovery had me knackered. I’d already placed the flags we needed in LSAD, texted Zach Palmer to keep a weather eye on the goblin market, and knocked out some paperwork I’d been neglecting, so at that moment I just wanted a hot bath and a full night’s sleep. Maybe all this business with Nightingale and his _signare_ would seem like less of a big deal in the face of a new day.

I managed to accomplish goal number one without incident, and felt fresh and clean and relaxed as I climbed into bed with good old Gaius Lucilius in hand. If anyone was going to deliver me to blessed sleep, it was this man. I settled in for a read, and was halfway to lights out when I felt it. Nightingale, doing spellwork.

I think until that point, I had just assumed that once you reached a certain level of skill with magic, you didn’t have to train or practice anymore. Or more accurately, I was so caught up in my own training that I had never really given much thought to life after I’d finished. Ten years was a long time, and I’d barely slogged through the first tenth. As for how Nightingale kept himself sharp - to be honest, I saw him as such a force of nature that a good part of me figured he just sprang from the earth fully formed, swinging his staff and casually punching holes through the laws of the thermodynamics. I mean, I’m not completely daft. Theoretically, I knew at some point he had been a child, fumbling his way through the rudiments. I just could never fully picture it, and whenever I tried, I saw a version of my Nightingale in miniature which was just disturbing.

But force of nature or not, of course he practiced and did his drills. This was Nightingale we were talking about. I don’t know how I could have ever figured differently.

I felt it at first as a disturbance in the air, like when the heater kicks on for the first time at the start of winter. It was enough to yank me out of my doze, and as I blinked around my room, I felt it again. It was Nightingale’s _signare_ , somehow tangible even through the floor that separated us. Fainter by far than what I’d sensed at the Wellcome Center, it was there nonetheless, tugging at me in a way I couldn’t ignore. Judging by the quick and practiced flow of the magic, he was running his paces through a familiar course. It reminded me of my dad running through his scales to warm up before a gig.

I couldn’t make out the _formae_ or anything like that. It was too distant and faint. It felt more like a sense impression, the afterimage of his magic stirring around me. This time, instead of the intense focused burn from before, Nightingale’s _signare_ felt warm and comfortable, like slipping into an old sweatshirt.

I rolled onto my back, staring up at the twisted black shadows cast by the tree branches outside my window. Through that creaking layer of wood, pipes and plaster over my head, Nightingale sat in his room, carefully honing his craft. I imagined him in a circle of orange lamplight, his head bent and that focused look in his eyes, spells twisting and flicking through his long fingers. It made me wonder how many nights, how many decades he had kept this nightly vigil, quietly keeping his strength up to protect a city that had moved on without him.

I didn’t want to put a name to the sharp, sweet feeling that settled in below my ribs. So instead, I just let the swimming current of Nightingale’s magic wash over me like a waking dream, and eventually nodded off.

Slept better than I had since Oxford Circus, too.


	3. Chapter 3

Practice in the labs with Nightingale became sort of complicated, after that.

My boss’s teaching style hails from a time when endless drills and grueling repetition were the cutting edge of educational theory - which had always been fine by me, even if it sometimes felt like the magical equivalent of running repeatedly into a brick wall.  With enough demonstration, the  _ forma _ in question would rise in my mind like a shaken Polaroid, til I could grasp it and recreate it myself.  

I was not doing quite as much grasping now.  

As per usual, when Nightingale saw me or Lesley fumble a spell, he patiently repeated the  _ forma _ for as long as it took for us to get it.  The difference was, now each repetition left me more and more breathless, until I could barely string a sentence together, let alone figure out what the fuck  _ emundabit _ was supposed to look like in my head.

“ _ Emundabit, _ ” Nightingale said for the 100000th time.  The lick of magic that burned through me pulled a gasp out of my throat that I quickly turned into a hacking cough.  I was white-knuckling the edges of the table by this point, and I was so oversensitized that I think Nightingale could have just breathed on me and I would have toppled over.

“Can we see that just one more time?” Lesley asked innocently.  Pure evil, that one.

Nightingale frowned, perplexed.  He looked back and forth between us with the same expression he usually reserved for Snapchat filters or the UberEats driver, who he still thought was a random person trying to use free food as a pretext to snoop around the Folly.

“You two are up to something,” he said.

Lesley’s big blue eyes blinked through her mask.  Her “not me, guv?” look that worked on exactly no one who knew her well enough.  And god knows what I looked like. A quivering mess, I imagine.

Or, as Nightingale took the opportunity to helpfully inform me, I looked “a bit under the weather.”  Which I guess was pretty accurate, if your working definition of “under the weather” was “robotically suppressing all signs of outward human emotion as much as one could when one’s trousers were in a state of uncomfortable tightness.”

I weighed my options.  If I told Nightingale I was fine, he would continue his onslaught of relentlessly...  _ stimulating  _ spellwork, and I ran a high risk of not making it out of this lab with my sanity intact.  If I called off sick, though, I would still be stuck sitting at the lab table like a muppet until certain physical reactions subsided, because I was not about to parade around the Folly fully erect.  

I went for option three: distract and deflect.  “Let’s say I was feeling sick - would this  _ forma _ really be able to heal me?”

Nightingale sighed and gave me a hairy look that told me he knew exactly what I was doing, but respected my basic human right to evasiveness enough not to push it.  “Not quite,” he said, “You can think of  _ emundabit _ as more of a topical disinfectant.  You wouldn’t want to use it as a substitute for medical treatment, but it serves well enough as a preventative measure.  A schoolfellow of mine at Casterbrook used it so often we thought he was going to hemorrhage before he reached maturity.”  He gave a wry little smile at the memory.

“Let me guess, it was your mate Horace,” I said.  I’d gathered from the scraps that Nightingale let fall from his past that old Horace Greenway was a bit OCD, back when the technical term for it was still ‘high strung.’

Nightingale looked surprised, then pleased. “Quite right,” he said, his smile warming, “He had such a penchant for cleanliness. We used to tease him mercilessly for his horror of getting mud on his rugby kit.”  

“You can use this  _ forma _ to clean clothes with?” Lesley asked.

Nightingale laughed.  It was a good look on him.  “Horace would have loved that.  It can’t, unfortunately. As I said, it’s more what you would think of as a disinfectant.”

That left me with all sorts of new questions.  How did anyone even realize what  _ emundabit _ was doing before germ theory became a thing?  Did it only affect certain microbes, or could it be used to do things like purify water in places with contaminated supplies?  And most importantly, how did I keep this information from my mother so she didn’t start hauling me to work with her like a human Dettol wipe?

This line of thought did a bang up job of killing my libido.  Lesley could tell my mind had switched gears, too - she rolled her eyes at me and I smirked back.  The spirit of scientific curiosity was going to keep my boners in check. I had cracked the code, and I was going to take this inspiration and run with it as far as I could.

“Does this have anything to do with our haunted arm, sir?”

Nightingale nodded.  “Good eye, Peter. It was one of the  _ formae _ involved in the banishing spell you witnessed at the Wellcome Center.”

“Any reason you’re teaching it to us now?”

“It never hurts to be prepared,” he said.  “There are recorded cases of plagues like this crossing over from the metaphysical to the physical.  You’ll recall the London cholera outbreak of 1854. My family lost a great-aunt to that one.”

I sat back in my stool.  “Does Dr. Walid know about all this?” I asked.  It strained belief that Dr. Walid would be aware of this wide new vista of magical disease and not be up to his gills in research.

Nightingale gave me a look and tapped his finger firmly on the desk.  “I believe we’re starting to get sidetracked,” he said pointedly. 

“Hear hear,” said Lesley.  So back to work we went. 

Thankfully, it wasn’t long until Nightingale decided we’d come close enough to cooking our brains and set us loose.  It was a close thing, but I made it out with my dignity mostly intact.

I toasted Lesley later that night at the AB local, over my successful endurance test at the hands of Nightingale’s  _ signare _ .  “ _ Ad victoriam, _ ” I proclaimed, pouring only about a fourth of my pint on the floor, which was a feat considering how utterly sloshed I was. It was the last night Lesley could go out before her upcoming surgery, and we were having a proper go at it.

“ _ Ad victori- _ NOT,” countered Lesely, which meant she was trolleyed as well.  Lesley’s cutting wit usually fell by the wayside after drink three, and became a series of syllables smashed together at random.

“You do realize,” she continued as she tried to aim her straw into her mouth, “that you can’t just-” she batted her hand around - “you know,  _ deflect  _ him forever.  You’re going to have to learn magic somehow.  And he’s the one holding the keys. So unless you want to ask ol’ wotsit - mister - wossname - Faceless - if he wants a spare apprentice, you’ll need to - you know -  _ auribus lupum teneo. _ ”

“My luck, if I became his apprentice I’d end up wanting to shag Faceless as well,” I said.

I was full of it, and we both knew it.  I was pretty sure at this point that my troubles were all Nightingale-specific, and went far beyond my reactions to his magic.  Since I’d first sensed his  _ signare, _ I’d started noticing him in other ways - or more like, I started noticing that I’d  _ been  _ noticing him.  I caught the way the light touched his eyelashes, the red mark he left on his cheek when he’d been leaning on one hand, the one strand of rebellious hair that would escape his side-part on a windy day and give him a rakish look.  And every time I caught myself noticing him, it felt like a hand gently pressing a bruise on my heart.

A PC I vaguely recognized from our days at Charing Cross nick chose that moment to come over for a chat, and provided a loud diversion for the next half hour that helped sober me up.  By the time she started getting uncomfortably nosy about Lesley’s mask, I was ready to go, and had regained enough hand-eye coordination to disentangle Lesley from her bar stool.

“Let’s go,” I said, heaving her upright.  I made our excuses, and also the executive decision that the Asbo could stay put for the night, and piled us into a black cab.  Lesley immediately slumped away from me. Our breath steamed in the chilly interior, Lesley’s fogging up the side of her window when she leaned against it.  The window pushed her mask to an awkward angle, and I saw a strip of raw scar tissue under her chin.

I wondered what she was thinking about, and then remembered what she had said back in the pub.   _ Auribus teneo lupum _ \- grab the wolf by the ears.  Those Romans knew how to turn a phrase, even if most of those phrases involved stabbing, murdering or impractical advice for interacting with beasts of the wild.  

I caught Lesley’s drift, though.  I couldn’t avoid Nightingale, and if I couldn’t avoid him, I had to handle my problem head-on.  Which meant research, and many a whimsical hour in the mundane library in my future. I couldn’t believe that nobody in the recorded history of magic had studied the topic before, no matter what Postmartin said.  There was no way I was the first person to have this problem. And I didn’t remember seeing a chapter in Polidori about practitioners dying of  _ signare- _ induced sexual frustration, though it was entirely possible I just hadn’t reached that bit yet.

To my right, I heard Lesley stir, and she turned towards me.  “Dr. Chiu said I should have my voice back, if this procedure goes the way it should,” she said softly. “100% functionality.”

“That’s great,” I said, suddenly feeling like an utter knob for moping in my corner of the cab while Lesley was trying to brace herself for another surgery.  By my count it was her sixth, but I don’t think surgery is one of those things that gets easier the more you do it. “I can get back to destroying you at Rock Band on an even playing field.”

She let out a hoarse laugh, and then settled back in her seat with her eyes closed.  I covered her hand with mine, squeezed it, and we finished the rest of the ride in silence.


	4. Chapter 4

Nightingale cornered me in the library several days later.  

“ _Totem, Taboo, and the Teleology of_ _Signare_ ,” he read over my shoulder, tilting his head to see the spines of the books stacked on my desk.  “And here I thought you had spent your last two days holed up in here industriously studying your Latin.”

Funny he should mention that, because almost none of the literature on the subject was written in Latin at all.  Most of it was in English or German, originated in the early 20th century, and had Freud’s greasy little fingerprints all over it.  I guess I should have assumed wizards would be as susceptible to trendy pseudoscience as anyone else, but I have to admit I was a bit disappointed.

“Have you found anything of note?” Nightingale asked, picking up another book -  _ On the Interpretation of Signare _ .  By his arched eyebrow, I got the feeling that he was not impressed, either.  

“Not much,” I said, trying to be subtle about covering up my notes and pushing them to the side.  I’d read just enough to start feeling both annoyed and uncomfortably exposed, but not enough to feel like I had made any real headway.  Not that I would tell Nightingale even if I had. ‘ _ By the way, I’ve got an insight into why your  _ signare  _ seems directly networked to my johnson, no need to file that Professional Standards complaint _ .’  No thanks.  

Nightingale, I found when I turned fully to face him, was looking ridiculously handsome in the cool glow of the morning light.  He wore the light brown herringbone tweed with its clean lines that made his legs seem to go on for ages, and his cheeks were still a mottled pink from shaving earlier that morning.  He looked at me with the intent, serious expression he usually reserved for sensing _vestigia._  

I kept my face these-are-not-the-droids-you-are-looking-for blank, but couldn’t stop myself from shifting nervously in my seat.  We hadn’t practiced in the labs since Lesley had left for hospital, aside from one morning at the target range that thankfully hadn’t involved any demonstrations on Nightingale’s part.  If he were to suggest it, I wasn’t sure I could survive a one-on-one class. Particularly with him looking like that. 

Thankfully, I didn’t have to worry about that just yet.  “If you can put aside your studies for a moment,” he said, “I’d like to re-interview one of our Little Crocodiles, and I thought you might want to come along.”

This surprised me.  I thought that between the three of us, we’d done a pretty thorough job of violating the privacy rights of every suspect we’d interviewed so far.  “Which rascal gave us the slip?” I asked.

“Fred Courtenay,” he replied.  I ran through my mental list of Crocodiles and thought I could place him.  One of Nightingale’s interviewees – mid-sixties, old money, art conservator, lived alone.  “Reviewing my notes,” Nightingale went on, “I believe there are points that could use some following up.”

I pressed him on what these points were, exactly, but Nightingale didn’t elaborate, just told me to come along if I was interested.

After two days in the icy tundra of the mundane library, even being trapped in a car with Nightingale and his annoyingly attractive aftershave seemed like a decent prospect.  Plus, he’d probably noticed that I’d been avoiding him, and the last thing I wanted was for him to get suspicious. It was time to face the music.

It was bitterly cold outside, and the sky that sort of pearlescent, flat grey that comes before a good snowfall.  I was wrapping my scarf around my neck – a birthday present from Molly – and trying to remember where Fred Courtenay lived, when I saw Nightingale give a little wave out of the corner of my eye.  When he saw he had my attention, he swung the keys to the Jag around one finger and tossed them at me in one smooth movement. All this accompanied by a little sidelong smile that said “don’t get too used to this, bucko.”  Be still my heart.

I leapt into the driver’s seat before he could come to his senses, and off we went, haring through Russell Square en route to – I quickly asked Nightingale where we were going – St. John’s Wood.

My joy was short lived, though, because we trundled straight into the loving arms of morning London traffic.  To pass the time I entertained myself by winding Nightingale up about Downton Abbey. All I had to do was mention “Matthew” and “hospital” and he was off.  “It’s sheer laziness, to top off a character the second you don’t know what to do with him,” he insisted. “A character’s death loses its impact when they’re all dropping like flies.”

“You’re just still sore about Lady Sybil kicking the bucket,” I said wisely.

“You’re absolutely correct!” he said.  “What a waste of a perfectly serviceable character.”

“You should write Julian Fellowes a sternly worded letter.”

“I know you’re being facetious,” he said, “but I just might.”

“Is it accurate?” I asked suddenly.  I was surprised I hadn’t thought of the question before.  “The show.” 

Nightingale gave it some thought, tipping his head back to look at the roof of the car.  

“The look, the feel, the atmosphere,” he said finally, “Yes.  It does feel real. Sometimes uncannily so. And now that half the cast has toppled over dead, I think I’ll keep watching more for the ambiance rather than the storytelling.”  He had to pause here because I interrupted him with a laugh. “As for the lifestyle… I suppose the equivalent would be if I were to ask you if a film about the current royal family were accurate to your life.  The aristocratic set was quite removed from my family.”

“Like watching the Kardashians, then.”

“Perhaps,” said Nightingale.  Meaning he had no idea who I was talking about.

“Do you find it comforting?” I asked, “watching the show.”

“I suppose I do,” he said. “It’s nice to think we haven’t been completely forgotten.”

I gave him a quick look at that, but he seemed more thoughtful than anything else.  His gloved hand rested on his thigh, and I felt the sudden urge to reach out and take it the way I had Lesley’s the other night.  The urge was sharp enough that my own hand twitched on the steering wheel. My thoughts were definitely drifting into dangerous waters, so I course-corrected and changed the subject.  By the time we pulled into Hamilton Terrace, I was well into my counter argument re: character deaths (in the form of a spoiler-filled re-enactment of books one through three of Game of Thrones), and Nightingale was looking at me with a particular smile on his face that I didn’t recognize.  It was fond, and amused, and had a little restrained twist to it. And then I realized that we’d been driving for a good 40 minutes and I hadn’t felt awkward with him once.

The thing about carrying an unfortunate torch for your boss is that sometimes, it leads to a tragic lack of awareness of your surroundings, which is not an ideal state of mind for a copper on the job.  It’s also why I didn’t notice the orange 1971 Corvette convertible in the drive of number 33 Hamilton Terrace until I had parked and gotten out of the Jag. I whistled appreciatively, giving it a good once over.  If Courtenay had a car like this out in the open elements, I could only imagine what he had in the garage. 

The house was nothing to sneeze at, either.  As a general rule, the higher the concentration of cash you find on a London street, the more difficult it is to tell one house from the next, architecturally speaking.  Call it camouflage for the rich. Hamilton Terrace, however, thumbed its aristocratic nose at such bourgeois cookie cutter pretensions. It offered your prospective homeowner - provided they had enough coin to rub together - a smorgasbord of architectural styles to choose from, and was littered with enough blue historical plaques to look like it had caught a strain of alien pox.  

Fred Courtenay’s double-fronted Georgian house had a cheery green door and a cast iron boot scraper shaped like a greyhound poised to chase its dinner.  I wondered if the interior had managed to escape the wealthy Londoner’s mania for open plan minimalism - but I’m optimistic, not delusional, so I didn’t hold my breath.  

The man who answered Nightingale’s rap on the door was tall, skinny, white, and didn’t look unlike a greyhound himself.  He was followed in a whirl of tails and legs by two actual greyhounds, who sniffed at our feet curiously. Looking at them made me wonder if in a couple years’ time I was going to start looking like Toby.  

Courtenay didn’t seem surprised at all to find the fuzz on his doorstep.  In fact, he grabbed Nightingale’s hand and shook it with a relish I found instantly suspicious.  “Ah, Thomas!” he exclaimed. “Couldn’t stay away, could you? And I see you’ve brought a friend. Come in, come in.”

He hustled us into the high-ceilinged reception room, and Nightingale barely let us settle into our stuffed green armchairs before he got straight to the point, jumping back into the David Faber line of questioning.  He did it all in that polite, relaxed way that made you barely realize you were being interrogated at all until it was over. I tried to pick up on whatever angle he was taking, but the answers he coaxed out of Courtenay were bland to the point of white toast.  Maybe Nightingale had just gotten us in the door so I could have a sniff for  _ vestigia _ , I thought.  I wouldn’t have minded taking a look around, anyway, because it turned out our friend Fred had done his utmost to preserve the integrity of the Georgian house both inside and out.  I was just about to loudly inquire after the loo when I heard Nightingale mention something about a car collection. 

“I’d gladly take that Jaguar off your hands, if you’re selling,” Courtenay said eagerly, leaning forward in his chair.  One of the greyhounds thumped its tail and blinked sleepily up at him, and then settled back into its snooze. I made a mental note to check the back of my trousers for dog hair before leaving the house.  

Nightingale’s voice went a shade drier at that, though he kept his answer neutral with, “I’m afraid that’s not an option, though I do appreciate your interest.”

“More’s the pity.  I’ve been looking out for anything like it since your last visit, but there’s nothing so well maintained on the market.”  He swung his gaze towards me. “I don’t suppose you have the same interest in classic cars as your colleague, here? I’m afraid I detained him quite a while on his last visit, talking shop and looking over my collection.  I could show you as well, if you’d like.” He said that last bit with the eagerness of a man who had spent astronomical wads of cash on a pet project that he rarely got to show off. I looked over at Nightingale, and he didn’t seem bothered, so I said, “Sure, why not.”

“Peter’s something of an amateur enthusiast of architecture, as well,” Nightingale added, a little too casually.

“You don’t say!” said Courtenay, looking like ten birthdays had come at once.  “I’ll have to give you the full tour, then. This is a Grade II listed house, you know.”

We spent a good half hour schlepping around the place.  Courtenay was a walking encyclopedia when it came to the history of the house, and I won’t lie, it was a struggle to remember we weren’t just there for the view.  There wasn’t much to sense by way of _vestigia_ , anyway, as far as I could tell.  I caught the layers of background noise that you’d expect from a house of that age - the rustle of heavy skirts, the smell of smoked meat, sweat and furniture polish, and an unsettling, rattling, coughing feeling in one of the bedrooms - but nothing that felt new or powerful enough to set off any alarms.  I glanced at Nightingale from time to time to see if he was picking up on anything, but he just looked calmly polite, even when Courtenay and I got hung up on a particularly beautiful set of decorative tiles in the master bedroom’s hearth.

We ended our tour at the garage, which shouldered its way awkwardly into the side of the house - obviously a later addition.  Courtenay, or maybe a previous car-loving resident, had opened up the back wall and expanded the car port out to the narrow back yard, and the space housed three vehicles concealed beneath tan coloured covers.  He pulled each cover back with the gusto of a particularly scrappy street magician, to reveal first a ‘69 Dodge Charger, then a ‘71 Chevelle, and lastly - with a special flourish - a gleaming aluminium-bodied 1955 Mercedes 300SL Gullwing, polished within an inch of its life.  

I completely lost the thread of our purpose for visiting the good Mr. Courtenay’s residence at that point.  As far as diversion tactics go, it was top-notch. My jaw was swinging. I can’t say how long we stood in that garage, poking under the hood and admiring its innards, but I left in a daze with Courtenay’s card in my pocket and an offer to come by for a drive some time when we were off the clock.

Nightingale was steering me down the drive and away from the house, and I still didn’t have the slightest idea of what we’d accomplished besides near-transcendent contact with the divine - also known as the refurbished red leather interior and Sonderteile engine of the 1955 Mercedes Gullwing.  

“What just happened?” I said when I found myself in the passenger seat of the Jag. “What was the point of all that?” 

“I told you,” Nightingale said blandly, “there were some gaps in his account I wanted filled, for the sake of thoroughness.”

“Thoroughness.  Right,” I said, craning my head to stare back at the garage.

“Now that we’ve handled that,” he continued, “I could use of a spot of lunch if you could.”

That got my attention.  I’d come down to breakfast late enough that morning for Molly to get irritated and only leave me with burnt coffee as sustenance.  “I  _ definitely _ could,” I said.  “What are you thinking?” 

“What would you say to Indian?” Nightingale said in that same weird, nonchalant tone that he’d been using on and off all morning.  And that’s when I knew something was up. Nightingale would eat just about anything that was set before him, as long as it sat still enough for him to stick a fork in, but he almost never suggested Indian unless me or Lesley brought it up first.  And he knew I had a soft spot for a good samosa.

I turned on him with the full force of my policing stare.  “What’s this all about?” I asked narrowly.

Nightingale suddenly got very, very still, and gave me a shifty look.

“What?” he said.

“This!” I said, waving expansively around the Jag.  “That non-interview with Courtenay, who couldn’t be any less magical if he tried, and now you’re trying to lure me out with some masoor dal?  What kind of setup is this?”

Nightingale cleared his throat, somehow managing to look both exasperated and embarrassed as he neatly steered the Jag into a gap in the traffic through Lord’s Roundabout.  “It’s not a  _ setup _ , Peter.”  

He paused as if he were concentrating on the road, but I’d driven with him enough to know he could navigate this sort of knot in his sleep.  I crossed my arms to show that I was not impressed.

“If you must know,” he said finally, “I was worried about you.  Am worried, really.”

I stared at him. “ _ Worried  _ about me?”

“Yes.  Not such an astonishing concept I should think.”  

“But,” I asked, even as I half-dreaded his answer, “why?”  

He grimaced.  If I read that expression right, he was regretting not letting me drive the Jag on the way back, too, so he could conceivably duck and roll out of the car without damaging it.  

“I’d like to think I’m not completely unobservant when it comes to my apprentices,” he said, shifting his grip on the wheel.  “I’d noticed, since the incident at Oxford Circus - I realized I never gave you an opportunity to come to terms with what you had been through.  At first, there hadn’t been the time - and after, when things had settled down, I wanted you to be prepared with any spell or  _ forma _ I could put in your arsenal.” 

“Right, I can disinfect my way out of all kinds of tight spots, now,” I said before I could stop myself.

“I’d noticed,” he continued pointedly, ignoring my contribution to the conversation, “that you have been distracted.  Even more so than usual. And I thought you might appreciate Courtenay’s house, and his car collection. And perhaps enjoy a change of pace for lunch.  If you then felt the need to discuss what you experienced beneath the Oxford Circus platform, I wouldn’t have minded hearing about it.”

I nodded sagely.  “I see how it is. Lull me into a false sense of complacency, and then when you’ve stuffed me full of butter chicken, go in for the emotional jugular.”

“You make it sound so calculated,” Nightingale said, his lips twitching up into something that was nearly a smile. “Although, in retrospect, it rather was.”

“Not a bad effort from House Gryffindor,” I said, just for the sake of the unimpressed look I knew that would get me.  He did not disappoint.

The full-wattage grin I gave him in return was one I couldn’t have reined in, even if I’d tried.  I couldn’t help it. He had devised this whole scheme, just to check up on me and make sure I was all right. 

“You were  _ worried _ about me,” I said.

“Yes, I believe I already mentioned that.”  He was doing his best to look put-upon, but I could see the slight easing of tension in his grip on the wheel.  

“Well,” I said after a beat, adding several more syllables to the word than strictly necessary, “I wouldn’t want all your planning and scheming to go to waste.  And, if I remember correctly, I think that’s Star of India up ahead around the next corner.”

Nightingale shot me another quick look.  “I suppose I could use a bite to eat,” he said, and then his face broke into a smile so open and brilliant that it made me feel a little bit helpless.

We ended up going through about 6 baskets of naan between us, some of which I just crumbled to bits as we talked.  Never let it be said that I am comfortable with discussing my feelings - ‘stamping down your emotions’ is one of the first courses they teach at Hendon - and this kind of talk definitely wasn’t in the school of buttoned-up Edwardian repression that was Nightingale’s first language.  But one thing that Nightingale  _ did _ know how to do was listen - watching me with a grave expression that touched some soft, bruisable part in me and helped the words to come.  

Anyway, I don’t really want to dwell too much on what we talked about.  Reliving that experience once was exhausting enough. Let’s just say it was sort of a revelation for me.  I’m not sure what made more of an impression - the weight of the words leaving me as I talked through the memory, or the way the afternoon light outlined Nightingale’s features as he carefully watched me speak.  I don’t think he realized he was fiddling with his fork, turning it over and over in his hands, but it cast silver flickers of light over his face, making him look otherworldly. 

By the time we paid our bill and made our way back to the Folly, I knew I was well and truly in the shit, and with no sign of an escape.


	5. Chapter 5

“How are you feeling?” Nightingale asked the next morning when I stumbled in to breakfast.

The answer to that question was ‘not great.’  As usual, I had fallen asleep the night before to the gentle pull of Nightingale’s magic as he ran through his drills, letting it cover me like a blanket.  It had felt more intimate than usual that night, after our talk, but not in a frustrating way. It felt comforting, like he was standing guard over me as I dozed.  Unfortunately, the feel of his  _ signare _ took a completely different turn in my sleeping brain, and I woke up an hour or so later, painfully hard with my sweaty sheets tangled around my legs.

“Fuck,” I groaned, rolling over to press my face into the pillow and grind my hips into the mattress.  I could still feel the lingering twist of his strength in the pit of my stomach, like the echo of an echo, and it was maddening.  My hips jerked against the mattress again before I could force myself to go still.

While some incidents from my past - including but not limited to burning down most of Covent Garden and driving a hijacked emergency vehicle into the Thames - might suggest to the casual viewer that I have a somewhat whimsical and slapdash approach to things, I actually live my life within the boundaries of some carefully drawn lines that I take care not to cross.  The list had grown exponentially since I joined the Folly, but this was the most recent entry -  _ don’t, for the sake of your sanity, have one off while thinking about your boss. _

Feeding the beast wasn’t going to help me any - it would just make it awkward looking him in the eye in the morning.  I was already treading dangerous waters, anyway - I couldn’t control my dreams, which supplied me with plenty of half-formed images of Nightingale with his head thrown back, or his lips on my neck, or - in one particularly vivid instance - face-down under me and pushing urgently back against my fingers.  Images that didn’t help me any when they came back in HD quality the next day when Nightingale was doing something mundane like adjusting his necktie or bending over to fasten Toby’s leash, leaving me red faced and guilty. The dreams were bad enough - acting on them was strictly out of the question if I wanted to make it through my apprenticeship with my sanity intact.

All this was easier said than done, however, when I could feel a damp spot seeping into the front of my boxers.

“ _ Fuck _ ,” I said, twisting onto my back again and staring determinedly up at the ceiling.  I’m not sure how long I flopped around like that, trying to will my arousal away, and I don’t know when, exactly, I finally managed to fall asleep.  I just know that it was late enough that I felt like reheated death when I woke at 7:30 to Toby barking in the atrium.

“I’m fine,” I said at the breakfast table, giving Nightingale my best approximation at a smile as I heaped eggs on my plate.  I felt irrationally annoyed at him, like he had chosen to look particularly attractive that morning just to spite me.

He gave me an unreadable look, before taking a sip of coffee.  “Lesley’s father called this morning,” he said after a moment.

I paused with my fork halfway to my plate.  “What’s the report?”

“She’s recovering well.  We should expect her back before the end of the week.”

I relaxed, and this time when I smiled through a mouthful of egg, it was genuine.  “I’d better step up my spellwork while she’s still gone, then, keep her from catching up.”

I stopped once I realized what I’d said.  Spellwork meant lab time, which meant Nightingale’s magic up close and in living colour.  

“I was hoping you’d say that,” Nightingale said, apparently not noticing the look of horror on my face.  “I’m afraid I’ve been rather lax in scheduling practice for you since Lesley’s departure.”

I won’t lie - I briefly considered pulling the Oxford Circus card to get out of practice.  Not my finest hour, but I was panicking. Anyway, I had enough sense to not let that thought out in the open, but as a result I didn’t have anything to say at all, and just ended up faffing about with my eggs like they were the current greatest threat to the public health. 

Nightingale didn’t push it, but I could tell from the silence emanating across the table that he knew something was up.  And I did feel more than a little guilty for worrying him again, right on the tail of our conversation the day before. The part of me that wasn’t busy feeling exhausted, sexually frustrated, and questioning my future in the Folly wanted to reassure him.  Mostly, though, I wanted to crawl under the table and die. 

In the end, I must have been doing something right karmically, because our lesson never happened.  My salvation ended up coming from an unexpected source. We had made it to the lab, and Nightingale was digging around for petri dishes of mold samples that’s he’d presumably got from Dr. Walid, when my mobile beeped.  I was so distracted mapping potential escape routes that I’d completely forgotten to switch it off. Lucky thing, too, because it was Zach Palmer with a  _ deus ex phantom plaugeina _ .  The text just read ‘ _ u still looking for pirate rubbish??’ _  Which I took to mean he had some pirate rubbish to send my way.

When I called him, I could hear the sound of traffic filtering through the phone.  “Oy,” he said, annoyed, “I told you,  _ texting only _ .”

Zach had taken his new role as emissary for the Quiet People surprisingly seriously, and didn’t like taking phone calls because he, in his words, felt like a wanker whenever he had to whisper into his mobile.  “You’re not with them now, are you?” I said. 

“Besides the point,” said Zach.  “It’s common politeness, innit?”

“The pirate rubbish?” I said pointedly.

“Oh, that,” he said, like he hadn’t just texted me two minutes ago.  “Yeah, you didn’t hear this from me, but there’s a seller at the goblin market who’s got something you might be interested in.”

“Yeah?  What’s that?”

“I dunno,” he said archly, “What’s in it for me?”  A car horn beeped through his mobile and he shouted something unintelligible.  I rolled my eyes. 

“The restful mind of a citizen doing his bit to maintain the Queen’s peace?” I suggested, in a tone that also suggested he’d get much less than that if he didn’t cough it up post-haste.  Nightingale looked up from where he was laying out the samples and gave me a wry smile. 

Zach grumbled, but gave up the details, anyway.  I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding in as he spoke, as I realized that I had been delivered from that day’s lessons. 

“That does seem like something we should follow up on,” Nightingale frowned when I ended the call and told him the news.

“Doesn’t it though?” I said cheerfully, and Nightingale gave me another capital-L Look.  

“We’ll reschedule lessons to this afternoon,” he said.  “Unless you don’t want that strategic advantage over PC May after all?”

I decided that discretion was the better part of getting out of lab time and shut up after that.

Our destination - texted to me by Zach after much reluctant grumbling - was the old Haggerston Baths.  It was a beautiful old Edwardian Baroque building, built in 1904, when Nightingale was still a dimple-cheeked moppet toddling around in his bloomer trousers.  My guv had outlived the pool, though, which closed in 2000 and had been struggling to resurrect itself ever since. In between budgetary struggles and much waffling by the Hackney Council, squatters and graffiti artists had crept in, making themselves at home under the barrel-vaulted roof.  

Apparently, the demi-monde had been making themselves at home as well.  Nightingale’s eyes flickered quickly over the street, a policeman’s scan, then turned to me with a serious look on his face.  

“Would you prefer me to go in instead?” he said carefully.  Which, in Nightingale speak, meant I still looked as fresh and happy as a bouquet of dead flowers.    

“I'll be quick,” I said lightly, “We can't deploy you for any old miscreant or you'll lose your mystique.”

“We can't have that,” Nightingale said, and we exchanged a smile. I looked away first, before I could do or say anything stupid, and hopped out of the Asbo.

A few months ago, I’d done my bit to make a dent in the Folly’s budget by way of a tracker we’d needed to tail the brothers Nolan.  As a result, I’d spent a week or so after the fact tinkering with some spare parts to see if I couldn’t create a magical - and ergo  _ free _ \- equivalent.  Not because we couldn’t afford a big budget item or two - it was more for the principle of the thing.  If I’d learned anything from my mother, it was to not spend big money on anything you could jerry-rig yourself with a bit of spit and tinsel.  The problem was that I couldn’t figure out how to assemble something that wouldn’t also fry the innards of the vehicle being tracked. 

The plus side of all this was that I’d gotten a bucketload of cheapo trackers from my cousin to experiment on.  While about 80% of those trackers had either been dissected or transformed by my expert touch into hardened globs of melted plastic and fried wiring, that meant a good 20% had lived to see another day.  One such tracker was in Nightingale’s palm, waiting to be deployed once I was out of sight. 

Marion Wainwright - the potential pirate trash vendor herself - came up in the DVLA database with a 2001 Mazda 626 to her name.  Since we assumed she couldn’t bring the actual artefact itself to the goblin market without causing an attention-grabbing outbreak of mass vomiting, the hope was that she had it stored somewhere off site.  The plan was for me to scope out her stall to make sure she wasn’t stupid enough to bring an actual cursed item into the middle of a crowded area, while Nightingale hunted down her car, slapped the tracker on, and kept an eye on any quick escape routes.

The entry to the baths facing Laburnum Street was tightly boarded up, but I caught sight of the little cartoonish graffiti goblin that Zach had told me to look out for. It was scrawled at about head-height onto the metal door of a small, unassuming loading bay, and its leering red smile reminded me unsettlingly of our friend Mr. Punch.  Out of spite, I knocked three times directly on his face, and said, “Nice day for a swim.”

There was a moment of silence before the metal door came rattling up.  A bored looking twenty-something with a nose red from the cold gestured me in, one hand on a set of bolt cutters tucked into his utility belt.  Sometimes community policing for the demi-monde means emphatically not noticing a bit of B & E, so I just ducked in and gave him a cheery hello.  He barely spared me a look, jerking his head towards the hallway behind him before slamming the door down again. 

I followed the echoing sounds of music and chatter down a dark hall, which turned and led me straight to the old pool.  The first thing I noticed, besides the musty, damp abandoned-building smell, was the faded graffiti covering every visible surface in the room.  The chipped paint looked grimy under the light shining through the dirty glass panes in the barrel vaulted ceiling. I could see Olympia and Chelsea staking the space out for one of their clandestine raves if it hadn’t been so far off their patch.  

As for the market itself - a very non-DDA compliant set of steps made up of stacked packing crates led into the drained pool, which was packed ledge-to-ledge with vendors in makeshift stalls.  It looked like someone had tried to rebuild the set of  _ Blade Runner  _ on a secondary school theatre budget.  This was all overlooked by a raised concrete platform that ran in a u-shape around the perimeter of the room, where various members of the demimonde sat at cafe tables and tried to shout to each other over the echoing din.  

I felt a suspicious gaze or three swing in my direction as I walked around the pool, so I took the most strategic route and climbed up the rusty metal ladder leading up the concrete platform.  Some enterprising romantic had tried to take advantage of the dim lighting at the edges of the room by setting tea lights out on the cafe tables, but it was still dark enough that I could lurk in the shade, keep a low profile, and get a proper lay of the land.  

I was feeling more than a little smug about my stealth moves as I slid into a chair near the far wall, so of course I was busted the second I got comfortable.

“Looking for anyone in particular?” The voice behind me was accompanied by a hand that clamped on my shoulder with the force of someone who was not trying very hard to pretend to be happy to see me.

Leslie would give me endless shit for this if she’d been here.  Actually, if Leslie were here, we probably would’ve just marched straight to the market stalls, batons swinging, so what did she know.  

I pasted my blandest smile on my face and turned to see a dark-haired white woman looking down at me.  It was hard to tell by the flickering light of the candles, but she looked about to be in her mid-forties.  She was the kind of woman who could somehow manage to make the black apron she wore look like a fashion choice.  On reflex, I looked for a name badge, but of course she wasn’t wearing one.

“Just looking for a drink,” I said with what I hoped was a winning smile. “Red Stripe, if you’ve got it.”

“And when’d they start letting you lot drink on the job?” She smiled back at me, but her smile said  _ I-know-exactly-who-you-are-so-don’t-fuck-with-me _ .

For a moment, as we stared each other down, I considered just asking her point blank which stall belonged to Marion Wainwright.  After all, I’d already done the equivalent of stomping in and shouting ‘magic copper on patrol.’ The punters at the nearest tables were openly staring at us by now, and I noticed a vendor trying to surreptitiously slide some of his more legally ambiguous wares out of my sight.  But judging by her stare, I had my doubts that this particular server would be cooperative. So I went for defuse and disarm instead.

“Honestly, I’m not here on business,” I said, cranking the smile up another notch.  

“I’m sure.  Just soaking in some local culture, then, are we?”  

As she spoke, she casually shifted her weight to angle herself between me and my view of the stalls.  Interesting, that. I leaned back in my chair, just to be certain, and sure enough she moved along with.  One well-manicured hand came down on the table in front of me, and she leaned in with a truly imposing smile, all teeth.  I swear the temperature dropped a good 5 degrees. Either she was using a glamour, or she just naturally knew how to make you feel like you were crash-landing into a Tibetan mountain pass.  “I’m not usually one to turn away a paying customer,” she said in a low voice, “but your presence is disturbing my clientele.” 

I looked around with an air of exaggerated surprise, as if trying to see who, exactly, my presence was disturbing - but really, I had my eye on the pool area.  My interrogator leaned in further, but not before I caught a glimpse of a middle aged Asian woman hustling up the steps. A woman who, I might add, matched the photo we’d pulled from the DVLA database.  Obviously, someone had tipped Wainwright off. I found myself wondering exactly how much of a closed circuit our line of communication with Zachary Palmer was. We’d have to have a chat the next time I saw him.  But first, I had to extricate myself from the genuinely alarming woman invading my personal space.

“Far be it from me to disrupt your place of business, Ms…?” I said, pushing back from the table and hopping to my feet.  She didn’t fall for it, of course. In fact, she didn’t say anything at all, just maintained scary eye contact while pushing my chair back under the table.  Not exactly my finest moment for maintaining good community relations, but what can I say - I was in a rush.

I needn’t have worried, though, because I hadn’t even made it to the door before I felt Nightingale’s magic.  It was a deft, efficient wrench, like a fisherman tugging on a line. I stumbled a little, but picked up the pace after that, sprinting past the still-bored gatekeeper, who was idly picking his nails and staring out into the street.  More specifically, he was watching Nightingale, who was methodically advancing on a very displeased Marion Wainwright. He was doing that thing with his cuffs where he tugs them up over his wrists, which recently had me sweating under the collar like a particularly pervy Pavlovian dog.  

Wainwright, apparently, hadn’t heard the same rumors about Nightingale as her fellow members of the demimonde.  Either that, or she was feeling particularly confident that day. Because instead of gibbering in terror, like any sane person faced with Thomas the Tiger Tank, she decided to have a go of it.  She snarled and winged something bright and sizzling at him. Nightingale didn’t even flinch - just gave a mild swat with his left hand that dissolved the oncoming projectile. 

Wainwright froze, but unfortunately, I did not.  I only half managed to choke back the sound that that particular trick evoked, and slid into the side of the building.  Nightingale sent me a sharp, surprised look, and I tried not to die of mortification. His attention quickly turned back to Marion, though, who now looked too spooked to even breathe.

“There’s no need for that, Ms. Wainwright,” he said evenly.  “We merely wish to speak with you.”

She cooperated pretty well after that.  Marion didn’t even kick up a fuss when we ‘strongly suggested’ - Nightingale’s words, not mine - she accompany us to the warehouse in Greenwich where she claimed the artefact was stored.  

I found out later from Nightingale that Wainwright had noticed the tracking device on her car immediately.  How, we weren’t sure. I couldn’t get a straight answer out of her. Maybe tracking device-detecting abilities were part of the fey skill set that we just hadn’t learned about yet.  Whatever the case, she had destroyed the bug right away, which is why Nightingale had to jump into the mix.

Unfortunately, this wrinkle in the proceedings made for a bloody awkward forty five minute car ride to Greenwich.  I mostly stared at the back of Nightingale’s head and wondered what, exactly, he had made of the weird strangled sound I’d made outside the baths.  It could be written off as a million things, I reasoned to myself. I could have swallowed a gnat. I might have stubbed my toe. Maybe I’d choked up a bit of Molly’s black pudding from breakfast.  Occasionally, I remembered to look over at Wainwright to make sure she didn’t try anything funny, but she spent the entire trip frozen as if maybe, if she sat still enough, Nightingale would forget she was there.  And so I was left with my own circular thoughts - and what a delight they were.

By the time we reached the Greenwich Industrial Estate, I had mostly talked myself back from the ledge.  Nightingale was acting normal enough, anyway. He wouldn’t let me practice my lock-blasting skills on the padlock on the main gate.  

“When it comes to vacant lots, I prefer to exercise a bit more discretion, Peter,” he said.  Instead, he used his trick where he pops the lock open with a neat twist of his hand. This time, I had a chance to brace myself.  Didn’t make a peep, even though this particular spell felt like a strong current curving through me, and every single hair on my body stood on end.  I may have scowled, though, because Wainwright gave me a weird look. 

“My stuff’s all through this way,” she said, gesturing toward a weedy path to our left, which led to a rusty pea-soup colored hunk of a building.  Under the flat gray sky, the whole scene looked pretty dire, like something out of  _ Children of Men _ except with less character _.  _ Weeds clambered waist-high out of every crack in the cement, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see some tumbleweed rattling around between the peeling walls of the warehouse buildings.  The estate had clearly been shut down for a year, minimum. 

And so, once again, Nightingale and I found ourselves overlooking a bit of squatting in order to main public health and order.  He gave me a look like he knew exactly what I was thinking as we followed Wainwright up the path. I whispered, “Exercising police discretion to establish a greater level of positive citizen-police interaction, sir,” and he stifled a laugh, shaking his head.

“Best make it quick,” Wainwright called over her shoulder as she unlocked her unit.  “This item’s a nasty bit of work. Truth be told, I don’t mind you taking it off my hands.  More trouble than it’s worth.”

The item in question was a brass surveying sight.  It looked innocent enough lying in its wooden crate, but I felt that same queasy sickness settle in the pit of my stomach as we stood over it.  

“Well, it’s definitely haunted,” I said.

“Yes,” Nightingale frowned, touching the edge of the sight with one gloved finger.  “The  _ vestigia _ isn’t quite as strong as with our last object, but it’s definitely from the same brig.”

I looked at Nightingale’s profile then - at his lashes rimmed in gold by the dusty light coming through the warehouse windows, and the serious set of his lips, slightly chapped - and as I did, the uneasy realization came over me that Nightingale was gearing up to do that sixth-order spell, right here, right now.

“All right, Peter,” he murmured, touching my elbow.  He was close enough that I could smell the dark, woodsy notes of his aftershave, and see the white plume of his breath mingle with mine in the cold air.  I knew that this was the time to get to a safe distance, but I didn’t do it. “Let’s see if you can pick out some of the individual  _ formae _ in the spell this time.”

The problem with Nightingale is that, when he sees a teachable moment, he will milk it for all it’s worth.  He wanted me to hone in and focus on all six  _ formae,  _ at they way they interlaced to form a spell.  And to make that easier for me, he dragged it out.  Really, really dragged it out.

I locked my knees, the way they explicitly tell you  _ not  _ to when you’re in primary school choir and they don’t want anyone fainting off the side of the stage.  It didn’t help. Nightingale’s magic felt as sinuous and muscular as ever, and I felt it in my core. I cursed myself for not doing more one-on-one classes with Nightingale before this - maybe then I would have built up more of a tolerance.  

As it was, there was no way he didn’t notice my reaction.  For one thing, he was watching me to make sure I was taking in the  _ formae _ .  I quickly looked down at the surveying sight, like I could pass off the face I was making as  _ deep fascination  _ with the plague-removal process.  I couldn’t stop the breath that escaped me like it was punched out of my lungs, though.  I white-knuckled the side of the crate and tried to wait it out, but the feeling only seemed to get more intense as the spell built.  Another sound lodged in my throat, and a distant, horrified part of my mind wondered if this was ever going to end, or if I was trapped forever in sex-limbo.  

By the time Nightingale finished, I felt thoroughly ravished.  

And horrified.  Mostly horrified.

It was silent for what felt like a seriously unreasonable amount of time, before Wainwright’s voice said from behind us, “So… is it fixed then?” 

“Ah,” Nightingale coughed, “Yes, I believe so, Ms. Wainwright.  If you don’t mind, we’ll be taking this item into custody.”

I worked up the nerve to glance at him, but he was focused on sticking the lid on the crate like he was performing brain surgery.

It was going to be a long ride back to the Folly.

**Author's Note:**

> For the purpose of this fic, Postmartin got some magical schooling in before the start of the war (hence his familiarity with different practitioners' signare).


End file.
